GruppeM – Donington Park – Sunday April 4

Full Race Report
There was a far more relaxed atmosphere around the paddock on Sunday morning, and in the GruppeM garage the team’s mechanics and engineers were attending to the lesser duties of racecar preparation. Much of that is part and parcel of running a Porsche, while the rest was thanks largely to a physically uneventful Saturday race.

Overnight the #38 car had been back on the flat pad to check geometry and set-up. “The front upright was still too tight yesterday,” explained Kenny Chen, team principal at GruppeM. “The settings were exactly to the Porsche specifications, but it was obvious that the movement was restricted. We loosened it up a turn or two and now it’s moving far more freely.” The net result in Saturday’s race was that the tyre on that side – the right front – had been flat spotted by the irregular rebound, and within the rules had been replaced by a brand new but unscrubbed Dunlop.

While relaxed, there was also a confident ease to the way people moved around the cars. Chen was optimistic about the team’s chances, and also relishing the prospect of a front-row start. “It will be an exciting start, for sure,” he enthused. “Peter Kox is driving Tim’s old car, of course, so to have them alongside each other on the front row should be very interesting.” The VLR Porsche being shared by Peter Kox and Ian Khan is indeed last year’s EMKA car from the FIA GT, which Sugden campaigned so effectively. “Let’s just hope the weather holds. We’d prefer a dry race today.”

While the #38 car had been race-ready for hours, the #76 Cup class car demanded last-minute attention when an air-jack popped just half an hour before the cars were due out. It was sorted in time, and better now than during the pitstop, but “we’d have preferred it to have happened last night when we were still working on the car!” With the number panel on the #38 given a final trim, both cars were ready for the grid.

Tim Sugden, having handled qualifying for this second race would also be taking the start, while Phil Hindley would drive first stint in the #76. Bright sunshine took the edge off a chill wind as the cars took up position along Wheatcroft Straight. No repeat of yesterday’s last minute tyre swaps, with the clouds looking set for a dry race, and just the one green flag lap. As they came out of Goddard’s the pace car ducked aside to allow Kox and Sugden a clean run at the lights. Kox gunned the throttle early, gaining an edge on Sugden across the line and pulling out just enough space for a clean run for both through Redgate. There were no real surprises anywhere through the field, although Kirkaldy’s blast from sixteenth through to ninth should have been a warning to the rest.

Out at the front Kox and Sugden were immediately pulling clear, and even before rounding the Old Hairpin they’d eked out a six-length margin over third-placed Godfrey Jones, ahead now of the #60 TVR. The gap had extended to almost five seconds by the end of that first lap. Swift and serene from the outside, perhaps, but Sugden was fighting an ill-handling front-end within the Porsche. The new tyre was short on grip, and showing no sign of matching the other three corners. “It took four or five laps for that tyre to come in,” he explained, accounting for why the gap to Kox grew to almost three seconds during those opening laps.

By the fifth lap Sugden’s pace had increased significantly, and his sixth was a 1:09.927, the first to duck below 1:10. From that point the gap visibly began to shorten, but while these two battled for the lead, a third player was preparing to enter the fray. Andrew Kirkaldy had continued his inexorable rise through the ranks, and took advantage of baulking backmarkers to close to within striking distance. As with Race 1, Sugden may have caught Kox, but he wasn’t going to find an easy way by.

In the dailysportscar.com Cup class Phil Hindley had been generating quite a safety net ahead of second-placed Adam Wilcox in the DRM Ferrari 360. He’d lost a few places overall, as some of the NGT cars made good their poor qualifying performances, but he was without peer where it mattered. A fastest lap of the race on lap 8 (1:13.695) was two-tenths better than he’d managed on Saturday and set the standard for the class.

With the first quarter hour complete the leaders were dicing through the thick of the field. Kox still held the edge, but by less than a second, although the gap oscillated with the traffic. Then, on lap 18, a crucial moment as Kox was delayed on the exit of Coppice by the #81 Marcos Mantis. Sugden, driven off line, was unable to exploit the opportunity, but Kirkaldy had no such problem. He halved the gap, and was then able to negotiate the Mantis cleanly along Starkeys. All three started the next lap line-astern.

Where previously Sugden’s errant tyre problem had been attributable to a lack of heat, he was now struggling for lack of grip. “I’d been chipping away, lap after lap, and finally caught Peter, but no sooner had I done that than the front tyre went off again.” The brand new tyre, unscrubbed, was not performing in tune with the rest. “It wasn’t a Dunlop problem at all,” he insisted. “This was all down to the circuit. It’s very abrasive.” As they came out of McLeans, and started the run up to Coppice on lap 19, Kirkaldy was able to dive through into second. “The Ferrari was in a different world by then,” admitted Sugden. “I had no grip whatsoever, and he just drove through and there was nothing I could do to stop him.”

While the first of the driver pitstops were taking place Kox crossed the line with Kirkaldy now on his tail, and Sugden a second in arrears. Then, in a breathtaking move through the Craner Curves, Kirkaldy snatched the lead. With 22 laps completed, and the car’s handling deteriorating corner-by-corner, Sugden radioed into the pits and requested an early stop. It was nearly ten minutes sooner than planned, but if the team was to have any chance of winning, the Porsche had to complete its pitstop now.

The driver change is where Jonathan Cocker’s relative inexperience pays dividends. While Tim Sugden may be an “A” category driver, the new ProAm time penalty system means that Cocker costs the team no significant delay, and the seventeen-year-old was quickly back out on track. It took a short while for the timing screens to catch up, but by the time they did the #38 car was lying in eighth place, but with all the cars ahead yet to stop.

While he may have a short CV, Cocker is certainly not short on pace, and his first postings were straight into the low 1:12s and getting quicker lap-by-lap. It was soon evident that he was moving faster even than the leaders, with Peter Kox undoubtedly starting to suffer with his tyres. When Cocker set a PB of 1:11.044 on lap 30 it coincided with Kirkaldy’s dive into the pitlane, and promoted the GruppeM car to second overall.

Inexplicably, Peter Kox continued his charge at the front, leading now by almost a full lap from Cocker but the only runner yet to make a driver change. When he finally did make the detour through the pitlane at the end of the 31st lap the race was into its 38th minute, and the error would cost him a whopping 40-second time penalty. That, added to a slow stop, meant that the team’s race and Kox’s stalwart efforts were for nothing, but Cocker wasn’t to know that. He came through to start his next lap just as Ian Khan, taking over from Kox, emerged from the pitlane.

The yellow, white and red VLR Porsche was now clearly in Cocker’s sights, and with Khan not quite as swift as his experienced co-driver, the margin began to shorten steadily. It took Cocker four laps to catch him, and half way through lap 36 he swept into the lead at Coppice. “Khan was really struggling on those tyres, and I was easily able to outbrake him into the corner,” said Cocker afterwards. Jubilation in the GruppeM pit turned to consternation two minutes later when Cocker failed to complete lap 37 in the lead. Once again it was Khan at the head of the field, being chased now by Nigel Greensall in the RSR TVR 400 and, a little further back, Nathan Kinch in the #35 Scuderia Ecosse Ferrari 360, but where was the #38 Porsche?

The answer came a minute later when Cocker came across the line in seventh place. “I came over the crest at Coppice and saw oil. There was a huge pool of it. I lifted, but too late. It felt more like I was aquaplaning than skidding,” he said. The car buried itself rear-end first into the gravel “I tried to attract the marshals’ attention, but they were so slow! I couldn’t seem to get them to hurry.” It was probably one of those occasions when seconds seem to last hours. “I managed to find reverse, and crept out backwards. If only I’d been able to maintain my momentum I’d have been OK.”

Cocker did get going again, but he’d lost the best part of a minute. He was soon back up to speed and picking up places, including Richard Stanton in the Rollcentre Mosler, but another podium was now beyond his reach. Even Ian Khan, who took his pitlane penalty on lap 40, was just too far ahead.

The race, which was drawing to a close, still had a twist in the tail. It started to rain. It wasn’t much to begin with, just a light drizzle, but with what should have been one more lap to go, it turned nasty. Every car was on slicks, Kinch had just taken the lead from Greensall, and the clock suggested time enough for one more. The officials disagreed. Cars were already sliding around like championship skaters and a major accident was just around the corner. With the leader somewhere out near the Old Hairpin, the chequered flag began a frantic wave. Some drivers slowed down, others pressed on at full pelt. It bordered on chaos, but the message finally sank in.

There was a further period of confusion when there was a delay in publishing the official result, but when it arrived it confirmed Cocker in fifth, still in the points, but not where he’d hoped to be. Jonathan Rowland, driving the #76 Cup class Porsche after his swap with Phil Hindley, had maintained a steady pace to the finish. He’d been handed a class lead of almost half a minute and could afford to take things relatively easily. He crossed the line more than five seconds clear of Ni Amorim in the DRM Ferrari to record a second successive win. It was worthy compensation for the hard work GruppeM has put into the weekend.

So this was the race that could so nearly have given Kenny Chen’s GruppeM an emphatic double, but fate ensured that the dream result would have to wait for another day. “That’s racing,” shrugged Kenny Chen later. “Sh*t happens!” Personal disappointments aside, this had been a thrilling race from start to finish, and the perfect advertisement for the new-look British GT Championship. All through the field there had been action aplenty, and GruppeM’s cars were ever in the thick of it.

“We could have won that,” declared Jonathan Cocker, hiding his disappointment well. Kenny Chen agreed. “If that oil hadn’t have been there, we might have won both classes, but we must be positive. We’ve demonstrated that we can win, and it’s only the first race, after all. It’s no big deal.” Tim Sugden’s verdict was equally upbeat. “I’m still pleased,” he conceded. “With a bit more luck we could have won, but we’ve still had two good finishes and that’s an excellent start. We can build on that for the next race.” The team has not only identified their main rivals this weekend, but also isolated a previously tricky problem. “We knew the Ferrari was going to be quick,” added Sugden, “but now that we’ve found out what our problem was we can head off to Pembrey and sort it out.” The squad is off to the South Wales track at the end of the month for an exclusive two-day test.